Serious gaming for participatory planning of multi-hazard mitigation

ABSTRACTCollaborative, holistic, and proactive planning for basin-wide water management solutions addressing multiple water-related hazards is challenging. Shared vision planning (SVP) and decision support systems (DSSs) are two approaches that have been used to address the challenges described. SVP is a participatory planning process. DSSs can efficiently support the integration of multiple and vast amounts of information and interactively illustrate the trade-offs between alternative mitigation plans. While SVP and DSS have been previously used to help stakeholders to better understand watershed processes and how to arrive at collaborative basin-wide decisions, coupling these tools with serious gaming is an emerging effort. The multi-hazard tournament (MHT) framework is an example of the integration of serious gaming, DSS and SVP. The MHT is based on the premise that almost all cultures and individuals understand and enjoy sports, teams and structured games. This paper first introduces a new approach ca...